Two companies — one small, Valencell, and one gargantuan, STMicroelectronics — have worked together to produce “an accurate and scalable development kit for biometric wearables”. The kit has essential components from both companies, with Valencell contributing their Benchmark biometric sensor system, and ST throwing in their compact SensorTile turnkey multi-sensor module.

The SensorTile is a 13.5 × 13.5 mm IoT module driven by an STM32L4 microcontroller, a Bluetooth Low Energy chipset, a wide spectrum of high-accuracy motion and environmental MEMS sensors (accelerometer, gyroscope, magnetometer, pressure, temperature sensor), and a digital MEMS microphone. By adding Valencell's Benchmark sensor technology prototyping, evaluation, and development of innovative wearable and IoT solutions is said to be a walk in the park. The Valencell PerformTek technology package in particular should help designers to reach immediate integration and delivery into wearable devices.

The  SensorTile can be used as a sensing and connectivity hub for developing firmware and shipping in products such as wearables, gaming accessories, and smart-home or IoT devices. It includes a BLE transceiver including a miniature single-chip balun on-board, as well as a broad set of system interfaces. It can be simply plugged to a host board, and when powered it immediately starts streaming inertial, audio, and environmental data to ST's BlueMS smartphone app that can be downloaded free of charge from app stores.